Objectively, I'm with you on this one. A good film is a good film even if it wreaks havoc with the source material. But even so, on an emotional level, I still have issues with good films which do that.

Even within the same film, I can go from "it's fine with me" to "Aargh! How could they?!" in a matter of seconds. I haven't seen "A Beautiful Mind" or "The Scarlet Letter", but I had these mixed feelings about "Hunchback".

People have been adapting and rewriting good stories for as long as there have *been* good stories. So how can I say it's any worse in a book-to-film adaptation than anywhere else?

I think, for me, it has more to do with my feelings about the original book. I loved Victor Hugo's "Hunchback", so, even though I also loved Disney's "Hunchback", the incompatibility of the two makes my brain fuse. Both of them are masterpieces in their own medium. Maybe that's why it drives me nuts trying to think of the book and the movie at the same time -- and because, no matter how good the movie was, I don't like thinking that it supersedes the original in the minds of a generation and becomes the "real" story. Even writing this thought makes me question it -- what makes one story realler than another, unless it's being more widely known and more popular? -- but whatever. That's how it made me feel.

On the other hand, when I read "The Scarlet Letter" it didn't affect me personally in any great, compelling way. So if I see the movie, it's not going to affect me much, from an adaptation point of view. I'll like the movie or hate it on its own terms. If the adaptation strikes me as being stupid, laughable, or a downright travesty of the source material, I will think this from a more detached perpective than if I loved the book. Even if the movie ends with the Reverend Dimmesdale becoming a male stripper and Hester becoming the first Puritan in outer space, I won't *care*, because I didn't care about the book.